Urban/Community Design

Urban Design, Art, Architecture and Planning

ReidCurry@gmail.com (Rex) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:40:00 +0000

Urban Design, Art, Architecture, Planning The formation of specialized groups helps to manage information and encourage ideas with imagination. The cacophony of thousands of new voices make this especially important. Urban designers have begun the evaluation of key knowledge assets formed by specialized design groups. (see possibilities below) The use of standards requires an integrated approach. The desire to accomplish a greater whole is a powerful motivation for bringing urban planning and architecture into a dialogue. (see below)

The UDC of APA Metro seeks a few short answers to three questions that may help to form groups for further inquiry. Please address or debate their relevance to your business/government/personal goals. The discussion will form “information pathways” about New York City the Region and the governance of its dense urban landscape to yield capital.

How will we design information pathways to allow the governance, engineering, and integration of our landscape in a way that fully understands the aesthetic importance of classicism as an integral part of New York City?

The roots of classicism are embedded in our demand for regularity of form and a general insistence on restraint of expression.

More recently, everything changed. We are forming groups to examine the disparate attempts to free architecture and art as a derivative of Greek models and Roman principles. This is New York City’s foundation, but not its future.

How will we design information pathways to allow the engineering of our landscape in ways that reflect the technological promise and growing political stature of sustainability?

As a given, we are asked to embrace bold new aesthetic expressions. They are filled with new information about our capacity to manage our carbon or plutonium “footprint” responsibilities. This is a vision that holds a promise to the unborn. We need designers to frame our understanding of earthly survival behaviors and practices that include the means to becoming a just human among all humans.

How will we design information pathways that integrate design, planning, construction, and maintenance?

In New York City, the business of commerce, trade, information technology and design-manufacturing, is the product of an ingenious structure for development, but remains as secretive as possible. To achieve a healthy financing climate secrets retain capital as hard currency but block knowledge capital advancements. If this is a true statement, we seek designers to define these blockages and thereafter produce an integrated decision making platform.

Proposed Knowledge Analysis Teams, Study Groups, Advocates & Researchers List is in Formation & Additions are Requested, the links lead to a group on this subject...

History: Standards, Metes and Bounds of Urban Design… Security: Nameless, faceless fear... Energy: Movement: Streets, wheels, rails, light, air, walk... Density: NYC’s Maximum Build Out... Housing: Diversity, Social Context, Means Test... Work Places: Diversity, Social Context, Means Test... Information Technology: GIS, TQM, CAD, Critical Path.. Public Participation: checks, balances, voting, conflict reduction... Market Capture Design: entertainment base, per capata assessments, view position, enclosure, sounds, smell

Interested in collaborating on the writing, editing and content of this in the pursuit of the like and unlike minded? Drop us a line? reidcurry@gmail.com

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Design DATA

ReidCurry@gmail.com (Rex) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 17:11:00 +0000

Question ONE

Is the technological promise of sustainability a trap?

Designers, planners, architects, all of us, suffer from a number of well-documented cognitive failings that distort our ability to predict accurately.

Hey, it is the future. But this could be changing for two reasons:

First, we no longer believe that the unusual event is more salient, and we are less likely to dismiss evidence that contradicts the commonly adopted meaning.

Second, without doubt we know our capacity to build for the future does not include knowing what it will mean to people or their lives.

This leads to an inevitable conclusion. The marketing of "the firm" as a group of experts is loosing leverage rapidly. New competitors are building open database connectivity (ODBC) as the alternative. What that means is simple - we are all involved, we are all participants. ODBC business partnerships bring unbelievably accurate tools to analyze/improve the urban development process. This is a new kind of knowledge capital and it is already essential to:

1) supplementing the design decisions and/or,

2) a completely new framework for decision making in the design reform movement.

The Decline of Expert Discretion

In Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart, Ayres describes the replacement of the “expert” whose knowledge is built on experience and track record and by step-by-step procedures used by computers for data modeling. He argues that anything can be predicted. Just prior to the publication of Super Crunchers, an equally popular book entitled Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner illustrated how extensive analysis of databases reveal hidden causes, and new questions.

Both explore new business structures that replace the expert. They skillfully illustrate how quantitative analyses of massive datasets make hundreds of real-world decisions using algorithms for people asking better questions. The question regarding removal of traditional rolel experts from the policy framework is not when or if, but how quickly it becomes inevitable. Is there any solace in this truth? It seems the answer is yes. The remaining and most important human element is to guess. Guessing requires a test to discover the variables that should and should not be included in statistical analysis, in other words, to generate hypotheses remains ultimately human. To ask “what causes what” remains the most valid human act.

The reality of our present experience coupled with an increasingly dense urban environment is the exponential growth in the number of variables. These “sets” of information are now well beyond our “intuitive” abilities to use, let alone define problems. In addition, these tools are used much in the same way that putting telescopes in space or microscopes in laboratories force new questions. The selection of a series of statistical inferences capable of questioning stored datasets is a vital new tool.

It will help designers to see things never seen. Discovering novelty and asking questions will remain as vital source of human insight, but sources of data to establish commonality will define the ultimate decision making structure.

Consensus on Question One (September 2007)

The consensus on this question is therefore developing as follows: There is a lack of extensive knowledge regarding viable algorithms useful for defining the aesthetic of the urban life experience.

New questions:

Who should be added to this group to develop the super-crunching urban design discussion?
How is end user experience data made a routine product for design and planning firms in the APA metro area?
How is urban design data produced, made accessible, and used to alter urban design practices?

Two Books:
click and buy and I get .08 cents... Hurray!

Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

and

Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart

Urban Design, Art, Architecture, Planning and...

ReidCurry@gmail.com (Rex) — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 21:37:00 +0000

Urban Design, Art, Architecture, Planning

The formation of specialized groups helps to manage information and encourage ideas with imagination. The cacophony of thousands of new voices make this especially important.

Urban designers have begun the evaluation of key knowledge assets formed by specialized design groups. (see possibilities below)

The use of standards requires an integrated approach. The desire to accomplish a greater whole is a powerful motivation for bringing urban planning and architecture into a dialogue. (see below)

How will we design information pathways to allow the governance, engineering, and integration of our landscape in a way that fully understands the aesthetic importance of classicism as an integral part of New York City?

The roots of classicism are embedded in our demand for regularity of form and a general insistence on restraint of expression.

How will we design information pathways to allow the engineering of our landscape in ways that reflect the technological promise and growing political stature of sustainability?

How will we design information pathways that integrate design, planning, construction, and maintenance?

Proposed Knowledge Analysis Teams, Study Groups, Advocates & Researchers
List is in Formation & Additions are Requested, the links lead to a group on this subject...

History: Standards, Metes and Bounds of Urban Design…
Security: Nameless, faceless fear...
Energy: Movement: Streets, wheels, rails, light, air, walk...
Density: NYC’s Maximum Build Out...
Housing: Diversity, Social Context, Means Test...
Work Places: Diversity, Social Context, Means Test...
Information Technology: GIS, TQM, CAD, Critical Path..
Public Participation: checks, balances, voting, conflict reduction...
Market Capture Design: entertainment base, per capata assessments, view position, enclosure, sounds, smell

Interested in collaborating on the writing, editing and content of this in the pursuit of the like and unlike minded? Drop us a line? reidcurry@gmail.com

If you made it this far...
Subscribe to the Urban Design Committee
Email:

Looking for Ideas
Details on this group

Runing With the Bulls

ReidCurry@gmail.com (Rex) — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 17:53:00 +0000

Running from the Bulls or Riding One
Is it a secret? Anticipating PlaNYC.gov

Real and imagined unknowns are part of our embedded information society, but the big picture keeps getting bigger. How and why New York City keeps secrets is the stuff of its greatness. Despite the call for transparency and a more open society, government officials, business leaders, and human rights advocates share the mantra of the bull rider that says, don’t get killed the moment the gate opens. The preference for advanced knowledge includes knowing that it will throw you off regardless.

There are many ways to look at an idea though; you can bring in advisors, experts, consultants to test the bull for weaknesses and its moves. A recent example involves the members of the advisory council used for the 2030 PlaNYC.gov project. They were asked to hear it first, keep it quiet, and begin to prepare their respective constituencies with ideas about changing the city to solve problems, meet needs, or produce higher levels of confidence. Knowing or unknowingly they have entered New York’s version of a time honored practice known as the “run from the bulls”.

Whether they are advocates for community planning, housing or environmental activists, business or labor leaders, everyone one of them has their own bull to ride or dodge. They also have some foreknowledge about successful placement within the arena, the running crowd or on a balcony above the fray. This is an OK thing. It is the burden of either leading or getting out of the way. Whether the 2030 Plan gets called the Olympic plan in a green dress, the World’s Greatest Bull ride, or the NYC version of the San Fermin Festival in Pamplona, every resident should be encouraged if one single truth is made clear. This truth will hold all of the increments proposed for change and raise them a simple cup.

All ideas begin as the secret of a few before they are shared, but we also have a city that will argue for a better life for all residents regardless of their household’s income. This is no secret, and it makes a great city, one of beauty. New ideas must meet this first test, whether it is pressing to remove trans fats or bringing all New Yorkers to the shocking realizaton that the cost running the MTA is a financial responsibility that travels well beyond that paid by its riders.

We cannot pretend that the burden of financing NYC’s glory in the American sense or its survival in a global sense is the exclusive responsibility of the Mayor, his team or our political representatives. It is every “Jack one” of us. The simple uncomplicated truth is about our responsibility to protect vulnerable families. If this is not dismissed as truism, then the real proof of our work and our time in the making and re-making of this city will have a measure to value the change. The hard questions about this responsibility are like secrets. The real test is upon us all to start talking about them.

ReidCurry@gmail.com (Rex) — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 03:33:00 +0000

Community Design creates a combination of physical and socially interactive places.

It is a process developed by progressive architects and planners over the last thirty years. It began as a social action movement dedicated to solving the social and economic abandonment of the urban center. Cities such as, New York, Los Angles, Milwaukee, Denver, Atlanta and many others are in recovery.

In these and other cities, some communities have "circled their wagons", others are designing new social and economic integration schemes that "dance on the grid". As architectural symbols, the circle is limited and the grid is infinite. I know how community design manages the complexities of these two worlds. One is made of firewalls and the other is open source. I seek data and dialogue on mastering the delicate balance between the two.